Stripper's Guide

Here we have a back cover of the Chicago Inter-Ocean's Illustrated Supplement, the very first newspaper to print colour using high-speed presses. 

This Art Young page is from the Easter number of the supplement, published April 2 1893, and offers up some interesting Easter customs from around the world. I had never heard of "matching" (upper right), but I think he's perhaps talking about the Bulgarian custom of tapping Easter eggs together until one cracks. I don't find a reference to this tradition being called "matching", though, so maybe I'm guessing wrong?

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 3 comments

Brenda Breeze debuted as a Sunday-only feature for NEA in 1939, offering gags about a shapely blonde model. Being NEA, provider of Puritan fun to the button-down small-town papers, Brenda was a paragon of virtue and only showed off her cheesecake figure because, well, she was a model, after all. The girl was utterly chaste, the gags were reliably squeaky clean, and shame on you male readers if you ogled her. Later on Brenda changed careers and became a secretary so that modesty could be the firm policy at all times. It didn't seem to slow down the boss from chasing her around the desk practically every Sunday from then on, though.

When Brenda Breeze debuted she was formatted as a half-page or tabloid strip. It wasn't until 1943 when NEA bowed to the need for a third-page version and so added a one-tier topper. The original topper was quite unusual, but that's a story for another day. No, today we're concerned with the third and final topper for Brenda Breeze, Otis. Otis debuted on May 7 1944 and ran with Brenda Breeze right up to the bitter end of the main strip on October 21 1962*. Not that there were many papers printing the topper by that time, but old habits die hard.

Otis was a bird. Maybe a parrot? Maybe a crow? Gosh I really don't know. In any case he engaged in mostly pantomime gags, though I have caught the little dickens with a word balloon on rare occasions. I've also found Brenda herslf appearing as an unpaid extra in the occasional strip. The strip was perfecly fine, what more can you say? It reliably delivered a smile-inducing gag, providing you weren't old enough to have seen the gag done before. In other words, it appealed best to the under-10 set.

* Source: All dates from NEA archives at Ohio State University.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

Believes in Fairies

Charlie Plumb believes in fairies, but he hasn’t a corner on this believing business because Mabel Burwick does too. “Do you believe in fairies?” She asks, “I do. I envy no one, not even Cinderella or Aladdin.

“Actually I am the happiest person I have ever known and it was through drawing that such friends came to me!

“You and your school deserve everlasting thanks for. Helping me discover the golden Aladdin’s lamp which needed but a little elbow grease and rubbing to bring me friends and happiness.”

Miss Burwick has gone ahead so rapidly that it is almost possible to believe that she did have a fairy godmother watching over her. She was art editor of the Breeze, a school weekly which won first place over fifty others at Stanford University. She has illustrated a text book on design and has done excellent work in the greeting card field.

She is now traveling in Europe with a friend made by her art ability. Doesn’t that almost take your breath away?

…When the writer decided to turn finally to other matters, he had as assistant a determined young woman with an interesting Norwegian name, Odin Burvik. She could herring-bone up a hill on skiis as fast as he could roll down them, and she had one burning, devastatingly difficult ambition: to become a comic artist.

Knowing the stress and strain of strip-producing, the author decided to try her determination and gave her the most difficult assignments he could. “You can’t be sick; no holidays,” he said. She wonders now how she ever survived; but she learned so much in a single year as assistant, that when the big chance came in the spring of 1944, the Associated Press agreed to try her out. She won, and soon she was in full charge of “Dickie,” matching his bubbling energy with with the sense of life which gives her style its own special distinction.

Odin Waugh is wed to Hubert Buchanan

Odin Waugh of Jackson Avenue, New Windsor, and Hubert Buchanan of Pueblo, Colorado, were married September 13 at the the Bethlehem Presbyterian Church in New Windsor.

Over 100 friends and relatives attended the ceremony. The couple was received at a social hour after the ceremony in the Church hall.

After a trip to Torremolinos, Spain, the couple will reside at 209 West 19th St., in Pueblo, Colo.

Mrs. Waugh-Buchanan is a well-known local artist. Buchanan is retired from the New York Life Insurance Co. and also is an artist. He is president of the Pueblo Art Center in Colo.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

# posted by Alex Jay @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

According to attorney John Duncan and syndicate president Arthur Lafave, what the newspaper world needed in 1954 was a funny strip to relieve the sameness and drama of all the story strips. What they produced as the miracle antidote to this sorry state was Jungo, a strip about a super-strong but very friendly ape who lives in the world of humanity. Why a gorilla, you ask? Duncan had a ready answer. Because in a zoo the gorillas "get the most response from the public." 

Armed wih this unassailable logic the syndicate and a lawyer who really wanted to be a cartoonist loosed Jungo on an unsuspecting world. Duncan produced a strip that was unrelentingly cheerful, casting the ape as a do-gooder whose enormous strength sometimes works out well, other times causes unintended mayhem. 

It's a perfectly decent idea, I suppose, except that Duncan immediately falls into a rut of about three basic gags, none of which is exactly holleringly funny. And Jungo the ape, not being one of those talking varieties native to Disney, has a one-note personality that wears thin very quickly. Duncan did provide Jungo with a human family to play against, and that could have offered a little more variety to the jokes. But Duncan seemed rather uninterested in them and they were not often seen. Maybe he was afraid he'd be classified as one of those awful story strips if some humans spent a lot of time jawboning in his strip. I dunno. 

Jungo debuted on February 8 1954* as a Sunday and daily strip, and the Lafave syndicate did manage to get it placed in a number of good-sized papers. But when the features editors saw that Jungo was an ape of limited comedic abilities the papers started jumping ship pretty quickly. The latest I am aware of Jungo running is February 27 1955**, just a little over a year after its debut. 

* Source: Memphis Commercial Appeal

** Source: Cleveland News

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 3 comments

Here's a card from Tuck's Buster Brown Valentine Series 8. You'll note that they don't even bother to forge Outcault's signature on this one, so far off model it is. This particular one wasn't posted, but others in the series in my collection are postmarked 1909.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 3 comments